In a YouGov poll from January — conducted before Andrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, but after the revelations that led him to lose his titles — just over two thirds of Britons said they were in favor of the monarchy. That’s the same as in 2019, before Andrew’s calamitous Newsnight interview. However much opprobrium the ex-prince attracts personally (he has a net approval rating of minus 87), it seems he can’t drag the rest of his family down with him.

The House of Windsor is, if nothing else, resilient. Its history is a history of crises, every one of which it has weathered: Edward VIII’s abdication; Charles and Diana’s divorce; Diana’s death; the subsequent cataclysmic unpopularity; Harry and Meghan’s resignation in 2020. Every one of these was pitched as an existential challenge to the institution of the monarchy, and none of them ultimately was.

But Andrew could be different. That’s the sense you get, at any rate, reading Russell Myers’ new joint biography of the Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Catherine: The Intimate Inside Story. The book is, on the whole, spectacularly boring, perhaps because the Prince and Princess of Wales are too. The several paragraphs on the intricacies of Kate’s family’s party planning business, and the detailed breakdown of her nursery schedule, suggest that Myers had slim pickings from which to build his portraits.

That’s not, however, for a lack of sources. Myers (the royal editor of the Mirror) had access to dozens of people from William and Catherine’s inner circle, both named and anonymous. While this biography is unauthorized, it has also clearly been written with a “team Wales” slant. It would be too much to read William and Catherine as a manifesto for this heir to the throne’s future reign, but it’s certainly sympathetic to his and Catherine’s interests. Unpleasantness tends to get glossed over: the false “rural rivalry” rumor of William having an affair, which eventually made it into a Stephen Colbert monologue on US TV, is only alluded to opaquely as “hurtful and often dangerous speculation… untruths and fake news.”

Wherever William and Catherine risk coming off badly, Myers is keen to give their side of the story — particularly in the case of their disaster-strewn 2022 visit to the Caribbean. Throughout the tour, which took place during what we can now term as “peak woke”, the couple were beset with demands to apologize for slavery on behalf of both Britain and the Royal Family. A photo of the couple having an unscheduled encounter with a group of local children was described as “a white-savior parody” (four years on, it looks touchingly organic and rather sweet).

In Myers’s telling, everything that went wrong happened because William and Catherine were imposed on with bad advice. But it was an experience with an important lesson: in his speech at the end of the trip, William broke with protocol to address some of the criticisms. This, writes Myers, was a sign that “William and Catherine would be approaching things very differently”.

Perhaps most significant, though, are the mentions seeded throughout of William’s antipathy towards Andrew. We learn that, after the Newsnight interview, William lobbied Queen Elizabeth and his father Charles to take immediate action. “He never much liked his uncle and wanted him out of the picture immediately before the rot further set in,” says a source. We discover, too, that William was an early adopter when it came to Andrew: “Long before he was embroiled in the scandal [involving Virginia Giuffre], he’d always thought his uncle was a bit of an ignoramus.”

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The repudiation is so total that you might even feel sorry for Andrew, were it not for everything we suspect about his character and personality (Andrew denies any criminality). But there is a delicate balance here. Yes, the rest of the Royal Family has been insulated from association with Andrew’s misdeeds up to this point. The problem is that much of the family’s current popularity derives from that of Elizabeth II. Unfortunately for her posthumous reputation, Andrew was her favourite child, and she protected him for far longer than is defensible.

“The late Queen sought to protect her son from complete banishment, clinging to the hope that he would one day be exonerated,” writes Myers. “Similarly, while acknowledging that his brother could never return to public duties, Charles attempted to honor his mother’s wishes and for a long time stopped short of pushing for Andrew’s complete banishment.” Elizabeth reportedly contributed £7 million of the £12 million settlement Andrew paid to Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that Andrew had sex with her while she was trafficked by Epstein (Andrew denies this). Another £3 million was taken from the late Prince Philip’s estate, while a further £1.5 million came from unnamed other members of the family: the King recently issued a denial that any of it came from him. It looks, and is, grubby.

That leaves William in a difficult situation. Being Elizabeth’s beloved grandson is an asset, for so long as the public continues to think of her as a benign and morally impeccable woman who shepherded Britain through one century and into another. But if that perception switches — if Elizabeth begins to be seen as a grotesquely indulgent mother who used her privilege to ensure that Andrew’s accuser was paid off rather than heard in court — then the association turns into a liability for William.

Andrew’s conduct has the potential to deeply discredit the whole institution. While Myers refers to the allegations against him, rather prissily, as “a vulgar scandal”, they are more profound than that. The decision to appoint Andrew as a trade envoy (despite what was already known about his worrying associations) points to the alarming cost of habitual deference to the royals. Andrew was already nicknamed “Randy Andy” and the subject of headlines about him “chasing girls”. The government must have realized it was, at best, subsidizing a libertine, even before we heard reports it was bilked for Andrew’s massages.

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The parliamentary maneuvers required to discuss all this in the House of Commons, where criticism of the Royal Family is generally forbidden, puts the lie to the idea of Parliament’s supremacy. The monarchy’s place in the British constitution is underwritten by its shows of deference to our elected leaders — hence the theater of Black Rod having the door slammed in his or her face every year when asking for admission to the chamber on behalf of the monarch. If the public begins to see that as a fiction, the monarchy’s future looks perilous.

The case against Andrew, then, could easily become a case for the abolition of the monarchy altogether. Why, the public might begin to ask itself, should we foster a sub-class of the indolent and entitled — “spares” who are necessary as back-up for the succession, but who almost inevitably become redundant and curdle in their own uselessness. It’s all very well to point to the counter-example of the diligent, hardworking ones like Princess Anne, but there’s no way to stop potential Andrews from being born without tearing the whole institution down. As a secular age made it increasingly absurd for monarchy to rest on the idea of divine right, the royals have claimed authority from its popularity. This has a costly flipside for them: if they’re not likable, or even actively disgusting, their existence becomes hard to defend.

This is why one of William’s most important jobs between now and his accession to the throne is to put as much distance as possible between himself and Andrew: not only to condemn Andrew’s actions (at a minimum, associating with a suspected sex offender), but to make it clear that William was always, always wise to Andrew’s turpitude. Monarchs have always had to be unsentimental about their own family to secure their own rule. Once, you might have had an embarrassing uncle locked in the Tower, and arranged for him to be beheaded (or discreetly strangled) when convenient. Now, the murder is figurative, but no less ruthless.

Myers’s version of William is fair-minded but implacable when the things he cares about are threatened: he is frequently described as “angry” when he perceives either that Catherine has been mistreated, or that someone within the family (usually his brother) has failed in their duties. That’s a trait that will be invaluable as he reshapes the monarchy to fit the sensibilities of a modern nation.

But his greatest weapon may well be Catherine. The descriptions of their relationship offered by Myers are often saccharine to the point of nausea (one source says they embody “love in its rawest, most powerful form”), but there is a hard-edged point to this. Their marriage serves in a way to reconcile the hopes of his bitterly divided parents. Charles and Diana understood themselves, and eventually each other, as victims of the royal machine: both sought to make their sons’ lives a little closer to “normal” than their own had been.

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Catherine is portrayed here as the exemplar of that normality. Not a member of the aristocracy, but a regular middle-class girl he met at university. Not a trembling virgin many years his junior, but a peer and (emotionally, at least) an equal. Not a fairytale princess, but a young woman who takes her work seriously, whether that was her pre-engagement job at the fashion retailer Jigsaw, or her current job as a member of the royals. The snobbish jibes once aimed at Catherine and her family for being new-money social climbers, now look very misplaced.

Strangely, given Myers fetish elsewhere for chronicling every minute detail of his subjects’ lives, there no mention in this book of what I think of as Catherine’s most significant public action. In 2021, after the murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, Catherine attended the vigil in Everard’s honor. She did this not as part of a planned media op, but as a private individual, laying her own flowers.

Even as a longstanding royal cynic, I found it moving. Everard was not much younger than Catherine, living the kind of life Catherine herself might have lived under other circumstances; it also showed that she was one of “us”, even though she was now one of “them”. As a gesture, it was modest and compassionate, and the antithesis of everything Andrew has been accused of. More than anything, it articulated the kind of royal she might be. An ordinary princess — the true inheritor of Diana’s “people’s princess” tag.

Breaking the gilded cage that bred Andrew, or at least bending the bars, is good politics: it shows a rejection of the kind of irresponsible privilege that made his misdeeds possible. It also might be a little more humane for the individuals in the cage. No monarchist should feel comfortable defending an institution that has such apparent power to corrode a man’s morals. Our Royal Family will only be able to retain its special status if, paradoxically, it can assure its subjects that it is (in some ways) just like us. But when it is just like us, will we still remember what it is for?

Tragic figures who overreach themselves and come to nothing are traditionally said to fall prey to hubris: for the ancient Greeks excessive pride or self-assurance. Andrew was already an arrogant young puppy by the time he arrived at prep school, and later had his head swollen even further by being applauded for killing Argentinians. The result of hubris is nemesis, when someone or other cuts you savagely down to size. In Andrew’s case, the agents in question are too numerous to count, but they include one of the most courageous of his victims, his elder brother and — probably above all — himself.

Philosophically speaking, the Greeks were for the most part rationalists, but the tragedians among them knew that life didn’t work like that. Everyone was potentially guilty, not least the innocent. This was because the ancient Greeks saw guilt less as a subjective state than an objective affliction, rather like illness or pollution. Oedipus is a so-called guilty innocent: the fact that he never intended to kill his father, or have sex with his mother, is morally speaking neither here nor there. In fact, he never once justifies his actions by pleading ignorance, to the amazement of the modern mind.

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If Andrew is far from a tragic figure, it isn’t only because he lacks the necessary dignity, but because tragic figures must evoke some kind of sympathy. Aristotle writes of tragedy as evoking in us both pity and fear: fear because the destruction of the hero reminds us of our own sickeningly fragile state, and pity because we need to have some sympathy for the protagonist if his plunge from a great height is to move us. You can’t be an Oedipus or a Hamlet if you’re mostly responsible for your own undoing, as is the case with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

Andrew doesn’t know very much. No doubt he has some knowledge of ships, horses and dubious commercial dealing, but like almost all of the rest of his family, he’s probably never read a book. This is another way in which he differs from certain classical tragic heroes, whose problem isn’t ignorance but an excess of knowledge. Take Sophocles’s Oedipus, for instance. He is one of the smartest of tragic heroes, not least because he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, by doing so saves his city from destruction. What he doesn’t know, however, is who he is, which is to say who his parents are.

This is also true of Andrew, who of course knows who his parents are but not what ought to follow from this knowledge. To be a prince is to know that you have enormous privilege, but also that you must play it down. You can only maintain it by being suitably discreet about it. In a democratic society, entitlement survives by seeking to conceal itself. The late Queen was said to be horrified by the retinue of cooks, footmen and multi-purpose lackeys that accompanied her eldest son when he descended on some unfortunate friend for a weekend party. She herself went around Buckingham Palace switching off lights to save electricity. If your elite status has no rational foundation whatsoever, but depends in the end on nothing more substantial than the approval of the common people, you don’t flaunt your luxurious lifestyle in ways likely to alienate them.

Instead, you keep in mind the fact that admiration and resentment, veneration and derision, lie cheek-by-jowl in the public mind. You have to make sovereignty look like service. You don’t make public visits to banks, unless they’re food banks. You don’t descend on the offices of transnational corporations but on old people’s homes. Andrew’s problem is that he never learned this golden rule. Rude, bullying, pompous and infantile, he wasn’t only socially superior but actually behaved as though he was, which makes life uncomfortable for those close relations of his who are just as pampered as he — but have the nous to keep quiet about it. He once talked on television about “my first day at public school”, as though to remind us that he wasn’t sent to a back-street comprehensive. To be truly upper-class, by contrast, is to be ignorant of class altogether.

Oedipus does finally come to how little he knows. His search for his own origins leads him to uncover a monster which is no less than himself. At the root of his identity lie murder and incest, a darkness that no mere knowledge can dispel. As with Andrew, the revelation of a sexual transgression brings Oedipus low. In tragedy, you have to be careful what you do, because past events can breed calamitous consequences in the present. What you thought safely buried in the past can return to haunt you. Your own free actions can come to confront you as alien forces. Old ghosts refuse to lie quiet, but rise up to cry out for justice. In the face of this, the tragic protagonist must come to recognize just how frail and finite he is, and only then can he be redeemed.

Lear’s regal delusions run so deep that he has to be hauled through hell for them to be purged. “They told me I was everything”, cries the dethroned king, “’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof”. Caught in a storm, surrounded by fools and madmen, the lunatic monarch comes to acknowledge that he is not everything but nothing (“I am a very foolish fond old man”), and only in this act of self-knowledge can he become something. He has done grave harm to a young woman, his daughter Cordelia, but comes to repent of his crime and beg her forgiveness.

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All this has a political dimension in the play. Knowing his own weakness allows Lear to feel solidarity with the dispossessed:

Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel…
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

These are not words one imagines Andrew wakes up with on his lips, or indeed the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shakespeare writes in Lear that the“superfluous and lust-dieted man” must have a change of heart and “shake the superflux” to the poor. Excessive wealth and privilege insulate the body from the afflictions of others. A superfluous and lust-dieted man isn’t a bad description of how some now view the former prince. There are those of us who believe that princes are superfluous anyway, so that the phrase “a superfluous prince” is as much a tautology as “business ethics” is an oxymoron; but Andrew has taken that to an extreme. He would now seem, frighteningly, to have absolutely no purpose in being around the place — to be surplus to the needs of humanity. That is indeed the kind of forlorn condition which might lend itself to tragedy. But there’s nothing tragic about justice. However futile his life from here on, he has got his comeuppance. His heart is still beating, which is more than can be said for Virginia Giuffre.

King Charles would no doubt be pained by the suggestion that the finest work of his beloved Bard might be read as promoting some kind of communism, or even social democracy. He once called me “that dreadful Terry Eagleton” because he thought that I didn’t venerate the Swan of Avon sufficiently. Even so, he would have done well to make the work required reading for his delinquent brother, alongside stripping him of his house and titles.

Nobody’s Girl is generating global headlines and is, at the time of this writing, the No. 4-ranked book across Amazon. The allegations in the book are being taken as fact, with profound consequences — particularly in Britain due to the claims involving Prince Andrew. This week, The New Statesman, Britain’s leading center-Left weekly, published a cover essay calling for the abolition of the Monarchy in part over the allegations against the prince set forth in the book. Yet oddly, the full-volume media coverage blaring across multiple countries has failed to examine the existence of the earlier memoir, or its relation to the new one.

Giuffre, who died in April, was by far Epstein’s most consequential accuser. While others had already accused him of illicit sexual activity, it was she who first introduced the notion that Epstein orchestrated a sprawling child-sex-trafficking operation. And the civil litigation she initiated would ultimately produce an extensive documentary record that prosecutors seized upon in their case against Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Her chronology shifted over time, but Giuffre generally claimed she was lured into Epstein’s employ in her teens — in about the year 2000, when she was 17 — with a promise of work as a massage therapist. She claimed she was subsequently forced into the sex trade. After finally escaping Epstein’s clutches, she’d go on to become an activist-crusader in the cause of empowering sex-trafficking victims.

To question Giuffre’s testimony is not to exonerate Jeffrey Epstein. But it is also the responsibility of journalists to look forensically at the evidence, even if the findings may be unpopular.

Giuffre’s latest memoir is presented to the public as a work of nonfiction. She likewise originally presented the 2011 memoir as nonfictional — as confirmed by literary agents who were originally pitched the book. It was to be an exposé on the sordid crimes of some of the world’s most prominent politicians, academics, and business people, pitched as “a human interest story that could appeal to the Oprah/female set as well as the Wall Streeters who follow Epstein.” However, when the draft manuscript was eventually excavated over the course of litigation Giuffre had initiated against Maxwell, a multitude of claims it contained became untenable to defend.

Her lawyers were thus compelled to concede that the manuscript had represented a “fictionalized account” of her purported experiences. In court documents, the lawyers granted that “Ms. Giuffre began to draft a fictionalized account of what happened to her. It was against this backdrop of her trauma being unearthed, her steps to seek psychological counseling for it, that she drafted this manuscript. Doing so was an act of empowerment and a way of reframing and taking control over the narrative of her past abuse that haunts her.”

In the new memoir, Wallace makes brief mention of the earlier fictionalized draft, but explains that Giuffre chose to fictionalize in order to protect herself from retaliation by the powerful men she was accusing of sex crimes. Wallace has, however, copy-and-pasted entire passages from the earlier draft, with a few minor cosmetic adjustments.

For instance, in the 2011 memoir, Giuffre told of being dispatched to Epstein’s compound on the US Virgin Islands to accompany “a quirky little man with white hair,” whom she identified as a Harvard professor named Stephen, for an implied sexual liaison. In the 2025 memoir, this person becomes “a quirky little man with a balding pate of white hair,” and is a generic “psychology professor.” In the original memoir, Giuffre recounted that the man “asked if he could receive one of the delightful massages he has been hearing about from Jeffrey.” In the new memoir, this loose paraphrase morphs into a direct quote, with the unnamed professor purportedly asking Giuffre if he could have “one of your famous massages that Jeffrey has told me so much about.”

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Giuffre has intercourse with the man in both memoirs. In the first rendering, though, she offers the man a second sexual opportunity, which he politely declines: “That night after dinner and my mixed cocktail of Xanax and red wine,” Giuffre wrote in 2011, “I asked if he’d like another massage before I went to bed. He just wanted to stay up watching movies in Jeffrey’s theater room. As peculiar as that request was to me I didn’t argue [with] it, I just hoped I hadn’t disappointed him. I showed him how to use the remote and turn off the TV when he was finished before going to bed.”

In the new version, however, Giuffre’s description of herself as the initiator is removed — but much of the rest is simply reproduced from the old version: “We only had sex once, though,” writes Giuffre/Wallace. “The next night, the man told me he wanted to watch movies instead. I showed him how to use the remote control on Epstein’s largest TV and how to turn it off when he was done, and I went to bed. I was glad for the night off, but I remember feeling worried that I’d somehow disappointed the professor in a way that he’d share with Epstein.”

Nor is any mention made in the 2025 memoir of the fact that when Giuffre was later questioned about this encounter in a formal legal deposition, she explicitly retracted the whole story. Asked by a deposing lawyer, “Did you ever have sex with [this person]?,” Giuffre replied, “No.”

Revelations in the book relating to Prince Andrew have filled the British press in particular with wall-to-wall outcries of vitriolic censure; one esteemed royal biographer was even moved to proclaim that Andrew’s alleged trail of depravities, and likely criminal exposure, has saddled the Monarchy with its most damaging crisis since the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936. Evidently, few see any issue with making such grand proclamations on the basis of this vaguely “fictionalized” material.

“He was adorning my young body, particularly my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches,” Giuffre wrote in Memoir One, of the time she says she was trafficked to Andrew in London. “That was definitely a first for me and I couldn’t help but laugh, I hoped he didn’t expect the same treatment back.” She now writes in Memoir Two: “He was particularly attentive to my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches. That was a first for me, and it tickled. I was nervous he would want me to do the same to him.”

When ordinary people read such an account in a memoir, they assume that it took place. And it’s considered ethically defensible to reflexively ascribe truth to sexual assault claims (“believe the victim”). But while Andrew has approximately zero defenders on any continent, no hard evidence has been presented to substantiate that he ever had sexual contact with Giuffre. The main piece of evidence is a photo of disputed provenance, from March 2001, which shows him with his arm around the waist of a smiling Giuffre. Yet because the Royal Family chose to settle with Giuffre instead of fight her claims in court, and despite that the settlement included no admission of culpability, Andrew is widely believed to be guilty of sex crimes.

Furthermore, the Daily Mail, which first reported an encounter between Giuffre and Prince Andrew, paid Giuffre $160,000 for the story in 2011, plus serialization revenue. The journalist who produced that story also wrote for The Daily Telegraph in Australia that Giuffre “said there was never any sexual relationship between the Prince and herself.”

Representatives for Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Giuffre’s publisher, provided me with a statement, claiming that “the book was fact-checked and legally vetted.” A spokesperson told me that, “the book is a memoir, and it is nonfiction.”

Another curiosity: anyone who has spent any length of time following the endless Epstein saga will be surprised that the name Alan Dershowitz makes only the most fleeting appearance in the book. For nearly a decade, Giuffre made sensational accusations against the Harvard Law professor, claiming that he sexually abused her as a minor on at least six separate occasions, and describing each session in granular detail. However, in 2022, Giuffre’s lawyers drafted a statement confessing that she “may have made a mistake.”

Giuffre, for her part, claims that any memory-lapses or discrepancies in the public record are immaterial. “When you’re abused, you know your abuser. I might not have the dates or times right, and the places might not even be right, but I know their faces, and I know what they’ve done to me,” she writes.

Given the context of her repeated “mistakes,” other of Giuffre’s recollections may also warrant skepticism. In the early sections of the new memoir, she claims she was raped, enslaved, and trafficked by a large number of people — even before she ever met Jeffrey Epstein. First, she describes how she was raped by two teenage boys in the back of a car; charges against them were later dropped, owing to what police said was her “lack of credibility.” Court filings document another, separate claim that a different 17-year-old raped her; those charges were also dropped.

Later, she recounts how she was walking down the street one day when a white van pulled up beside her and the driver asked if she “needed a lift.” She got in, and was thereafter brutally raped, she says, with the muzzle of a gun stuck into her mouth. She was then repeatedly trafficked and raped by the owner of modeling agency in Miami; the owner of a horse farm in Ocala, Fla.; and the owner of a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale. She also introduces for the first time that she was continuously raped by her father, as well as her father’s friend.

Once she met Epstein, she contends, she was raped and trafficked by so many men (and women) that the true total can hardly be quantified. This includes an unidentified “Prime Minister” whom she claims savagely raped and beat her. She does not name this person, or give any other identifying details because, she explains, she is afraid he will “hurt” her if she does so. Even though she has freely named a huge assortment of other well-connected people over the years, implicating them in sex crimes.

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Rounding out the list of men Giuffre claims she was abused by is her husband, Robert Giuffre, an Australian whom she lauds throughout the book as her “protector” and “savior.” But in early 2025, she began accusing the husband of abusing her as well, claiming he was jealous of her professional success as a trafficking-awareness activist. Robert countered that Virginia had become increasingly violent and unstable. Australian child-welfare authorities appear to have sided with him: they stripped custody of the couple’s children from Virginia.

No reasonable assessment of this combination of events could conclude that Giuffre is a reliable narrator, yet her claims have been mindlessly transmitted to a mass audience.

She was a self-confessed author of fiction, whose stories became ever-more elaborate as time went on — an evolution that earned her a great deal of money, not least through book advances. Since her death in April, Giuffre’s brother and half-brother have been engaged in a protracted court battle with her estranged husband over the lucrative estate. They insisted that her recent claims of abuse against the husband be added to the book in a foreword, according to The New York Times. Nowhere does the book disclose that these siblings are embroiled in an ongoing legal dispute with Robert Giuffre, with millions of dollars at stake.

The unwavering credulity with which this book has been received by journalists, editors, publishers, and politicians is a testament to how the most basic standards of information-gathering and knowledge-production can be summarily discarded, in service of a narrative that people want to believe. For those of us who prefer to remain anchored in some semblance of sanity and reality: Virginia Roberts Giuffre was undoubtedly a disturbed individual, who may well have suffered grave misfortunes. But that her tales could be unquestioningly broadcast throughout the international media — and be allowed to stoke unrelenting political turmoil, even with talk of a constitutional crisis — is irresponsible in the extreme.

Brown’s insight is a potent one: the real moral hazard behind ultra-high-end luxuries such as private plane travel is the way they stand for exclusive access. An invitation to travel by private plane symbolizes inclusion in what C.S. Lewis called “the Inner Ring”: the aspirational set, the ones in the know, the insider group within which everyone longs to be included. And among the infinite poisons leaking from the Epstein scandal into every level of public life, one of the most noxious is the moral inversion at its heart.

Private-jet luxury is, ultimately, about an Inner Ring of comfort and snobbery; the Epstein story, though, presented a far headier temptation. The private jet filled with extremely young girls, known as the “Lolita Express”, represented corruption in the fullest sense. For this Inner Ring, the initiatory ritual required at least tacit assent to if not active participation in the sexual abuse of very young girls. The defilement of youth and innocence was the point.

And this moral inversion cuts to the heart of the modern world. For Epstein’s network simply took the training-wheels off a moral outlook that has come, by degrees, to govern the entire modern West: one that does not simply reject but actively seeks to desecrate the older, Christian value-system, in pursuit of a morality of power, violence, and individual desire.

One of the earliest and frankest exponents of this moral inversion was also, and not by coincidence, also a trailblazer in the literature of ritual sexual abuse: the Marquis de Sade. Justine (1791), written during one of his numerous stints in prison for sexual crimes, details the suffering and eventual death of Thérèse, a homeless 12-year-old orphan girl, who keeps trying to be virtuous but receiving only violence, cruelty, and sexual torture at the hands of everyone she turns to for help. The message, exhaustively hammered home by de Sade’s characters through lengthy interspersed passages of philosophical debate, is that the world is fundamentally godless and amoral, and there exists no governing force save power, violence, and untrammeled individual desire.

It is, in the precise sense, a satanic worldview. Justine was banned by Napoleon, and did not appear in English translation until the 20th century. But especially since the Sixties, de Sade’s radical libertinism and rejection of all moral constraints has come, by degrees, to appear almost ordinary. So much so that, in recent decades, it’s begun to look as though at least some segments of contemporary society view Justine less as a provocation than as an instruction manual.

I doubt the perpetrators in Britain’s euphemistically named “grooming gangs” have read the Marquis de Sade. But his pitiless libertarianism has, by now, seeped into the Western groundwater, not least via the entrancing image-making vector of the global porn industry. In some respects, of course, especially the widely acknowledged ethnopolitical dynamic to the crimes in some areas, these gangs are bound up in specifically British pathologies. But I also suspect that if my benighted country ever manages a full reckoning of these atrocities, we will find many parallels with the Epstein network — not least in the victim profile, and also, perhaps, the function of the abuse itself.

Just as in Justine, at the heart of these crimes is the pitiless exploitation of vulnerable girls desperate for love and protection. Girls in care, or with cruel or chaotic homes, absent or abusive fathers. Girls who had already experienced been molested. As Julie Bindel shows in a recent investigation of London’s rape gangs, the most salient feature of victims is often less their ethnicity than their lack of trusted, loving adult care.

The same went, too, for Viriginia Giuffre. In Nobody’s Girl, she describes a childhood scarred by abuse at the hands of everyone who should have cared for her. She alleges that her father sexually molested her from the age of 7 to 11, including trading her to a family friend. As a result of this, her behavior worsened so much she was sent to a deeply abusive “treatment center” where she was once forced to eat her own vomit.

It is, like Justine, a miserable litany of abuse: after escaping this setting she lived a semi-itinerant life, punctuated by routine rape at the hands of strangers and acquaintances – before, eventually, she was returned to her father. He then found her employment at his workplace, Trump’s Mar-A-Lago club in Florida, as a towel attendant — only for her to be spotted and groomed there, by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. “For 10 years,” she writes, “men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of ‘love’. Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.”

Some are already seeking to discredit her story; there are defamation lawsuits, and Prince Andrew, with whom she claims to have had sex three times, called her a “fantasist”. Who is right? Speaking of the efforts by some literary critics to downplay the Marquis de Sade’s colorful personal life, the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin remarked in Pornography that whether or not you think he did anything wrong is really a question of whether whether or not you are generally inclined to believe de Sade or the women who accused him of sexual abuse.

Radical feminists might also note out that the unhappy story Giuffre maps — the pattern of abuse, neglect, and desperate longing for refuge with trusted parent-figures — is one that reappears with grim regularity among rape gang survivors. Giuffre recounts how Ghislaine Maxwell seemed a warm mother figure to her — but also, from the very first “interview” aged just 16, forced her into sex with Epstein, and later his and Maxwell’s wealthy friends, while herself sometimes joining in.

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There is an unnerving parallel in Justine, in the passage where Thérèse is rescued, or so she thinks, from prison by Mme Dubois, a murderer — only to find Dubois coercing her to join the gang by offering to protect her, before shrugging or even joining in, as the male gang members sexually abuse her. The Marquis de Sade’s cold message of amoral power-worship, and remorseless crushing of compassion, is summed in the ruthless words message the gang gives Thérèse about her predicament: “[Y]ou must serve either our pleasures or our interests; your poverty imposes the yoke upon you, and you have got to adapt to it.” It’s hard not to think of the working-class girls groomed, raped, and ignored for years, or simply dismissed as “slags”. Whether the abusers drove taxis or flew by private plane, the profile of the girl was similar; the recruitment was through simulated affection and care.

And the use to which the victims are then put follows the same profoundly evil pattern. I choose the word “evil” carefully, as I mean specifically acts that set out intentionally to negate, to destroy, and to desecrate. Whether in the ultra-luxurious setting of Epstein Island, or on squalid mattresses in crumbling British provincial towns, the group-based sexual abuse of very young girls functioned as a form of social bonding, through ritual de-humanization of the desperately vulnerable.

Giuffre describes her own treatment as a thing, as Epstein and Maxwell passed her around “like a platter of fruit”. She also describes wishing for the evacuation of her selfhood: during sex, she says, Epstein subjected her to “so much pain that I prayed I would black out”. And she recounts how her abusers simply saw this as part of her job. When, she alleges, one former minister choked, beat and bloodied her, Epstein, merely said coldly: “You’ll get that sometimes.” Like the rapists in a de Sade story, Epstein simply viewed it as his right to make her suffer at will, simply because he was powerful and she was not. And as in de Sade, her torment was intended to be anti-morally instructive: a means of reinforcing the conspiratorial unity of the Inner Rings that practiced these secret, shared acts of cruelty and libertine, amoral defilement.

Again: like the de Sadean moral worldview, this kind of group bonding is satanic in the precise sense of the word. It is also extraordinarily potent. We can reasonably suppose the Inner Rings thus fostered continue to endure, whether — in Britain — among the rape gangs that remain active to this day, or among the Epstein elite. Indeed, the degree to which Prince Andrew, now no longer the Duke of York, has been hung out to dry, likely attests more to his relative political irrelevance than to the depth of his corruption, extensive though this doubtless was.

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Like Harry, Andrew is a junior “spare”. With tastes as extravagant as his natural abilities are sparse, he has spent his life humiliatingly scrabbling and tin-rattling to make up the shortfall. He is embroiled in the Epstein corruption for the same reason he has always been a royal liability: he wants a lifestyle well beyond his capacity to earn legitimately, and is thus a dear friend to anyone with the money (and the jet) to keep him in the Inner Ring style to which he’d like to remain accustomed.

It is not difficult to imagine a parasite of this caliber viewing the thoughts and feelings of trafficked teenage girls as being of roughly the same importance as those of the maids who cleaned his hotel suite. Giuffre claims that Andrew acted “as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright”. Andrew himself has always strenuously denied these encounters, though Giuffre later took him to court in a case the prince settled in 2022, for an undisclosed sum, without admitting liability.

Virginia Giuffre died earlier this year, reportedly by suicide. Meanwhile, the ongoing shadiness surrounding the whole Epstein network, the mysterious suicides and disappearing video footage and all the sordid rest of it, leaves one wondering how much of the Inner Ring remains intact even as ex-Duke of York Prince Andrew writhes in the media spotlight.

So should we greet this all, glumly, as vindication of the pitiless de Sadean worldview, and its rejection of any refuge or compassion for the victim? Is it true that there’s really nothing but power and desire? I think not. Giuffre’s story is subject to all manner of challenges and attempts at revision. She cannot push back; she is dead. But though she didn’t manage to bring down the entire Inner Ring, I think Giuffre was, ultimately, stronger than those who sought to dehumanize her. Her insistence on having her story heard, on being understood as a person, serves as the most potent rebuttal of all to the de Sadean morality of pure, pitiless power and desire.

Her abusers took Justine as their moral template, and sought to consolidate their Inner Ring by ritually reducing living humans to mere objects. It is a profound evil; the networks thus produced are still with us, as is de Sade’s godless libertarianism. But Giuffre’s insistence, in Nobody’s Girl, on having her story heard was her final act of defiance, of stubborn humanity. The depth of pity and anger her story has inspired, and the shockwaves it is still producing, on its own stands as proof that the Marquis de Sade was wrong.

While X has been about as level-headed as you might expect in the aftermath of her death (“So we don’t get the list and the people who talk about it keep ending up dead,” grumbled one post among many insinuating dark forces were at work), even the BBC couldn’t resist hinting at something sinister. “There will be suspicions the long shadow of Epstein’s poisonous misuse of wealth and influence has indirectly claimed another victim,” wrote its royal correspondent at the weekend. On Monday, Giuffre’s lawyer reported “no signs” that she had been suicidal, but dispelled any suggestion of suspicious circumstances. Whether we will listen is another matter.

This is a tale of shadowy elites and their unfathomable predilections; even the most sober readings cannot avoid the resonance of associations between presidents, princes and supermodels and a mega-rich paedophile. Its implications are inconvenient; it ensnares both Democrats and Republicans and gives the wacko acolytes of QAnon something to dribble over, pointing as it does to unseen networks of abuse at the highest levels of society, their bread and butter. Its twists and turns since Epstein first faced charges in 2006 have only enhanced the story’s conspiratorial flavour: shocking suicides, redacted documents and fallen heiresses are the stuff of a Le Carré novel at the best of times.

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The Epstein scandal has long smothered the human tragedies that power it. Its principal players have become lazily drawn moving parts in a morality play about how power and money corrupt. Ghislaine Maxwell is the dazzling socialite with daddy issues; Epstein the predatory magnate with magnetic pull over the powerful; Andrew the bumbling spare, Mummy’s favourite. It is easy to forget the real lives — the “ordinary” ones — drawn into the orbit of the rich, famous and royal. When we do remember them, it is because they stray beyond the bounds of the perfect, media-trained victim.

Virginia Giuffre, or Roberts as they knew her, was such a case. She was an impressive woman: her family describe her as a “fierce warrior”, but rather than being radical she was unusually steadfast, consistent and credible during the Prince Andrew case. She filed a lawsuit against Epstein in 2009, before his notoriety and while he was still very much protected by his wealth. She was among the first to name Maxwell; she set up a charity, SOAR, to help other sex-trafficking survivors — this is where a reported $2 million of Andrew’s settlement was spent. In the years since, though, under unimaginable pressure, her composure unravelled. A divorce and custody battle over her three children — with domestic abuse allegations against her ex-husband Robert — was followed by a car crash earlier this month. Giuffre had posted a bizarre message on Instagram, accompanied by a photograph of herself battered and bruised in a hospital bed, claiming that she had “gone into kidney renal failure, they’ve given me four days to live”. The driver of a bus involved in the collision came forward to deny that it had been serious, alongside the local police force in Western Australia. Regardless of the medical specifics, when the story hit the papers, it was presented, with tasteful euphemism, as evidence of a very public mental breakdown.

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By Poppy Sowerby

Of course, there are legal considerations. Both divorcees were, it seemed, engaged in a tit-for-tat over restraining orders, not uncommon in Australian custody battles. The Instagram post was possibly a bid for contact with her children: “I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time”. But it was also a scramble for sympathy and comfort. After her death, a friend had pointed to the car-crash melodrama as a possible reason for her suicide: “Being discredited was one of the many things distressing her in recent months.” She was “deeply upset” about being mocked over the post, it was said.

One of many unspoken obligations of public survivors of sexual assault is never to succumb to your anguish. Though the post-MeToo media landscape has had plenty of practice covering victims, bearing evidence of the traumatic events of the past — mental-health woes, self-harm, identity crises — still seems to make them less credible, rather than more. The Mail wrote that “some of Andrew’s supporters” (a presumably small but mighty contingent) had labelled Giuffre a “fantasist” after the crash. Inconveniently, in that instant they did appear to have a point; her story did seem to have been exaggerated, and there was little evidence of her having been close to death.

Yet, the truth is that real-life victims do not retreat to a life of martyred perfectionism, softly delivering statements to gathered journalists with no more than one trembling tear. They are not animated courtroom exhibits. Female victims in particular draw the most sympathy when they are meek and withdrawn, never brash or erratic. They must be noble, saintly, virginal even — Joan of Arc — to be believed; the public cannot yet cope with complex backstories. Ten years ago, the Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez was among the first accusers of Harvey Weinstein; she participated in an NYPD sting operation, wearing a wire and having him admit to groping and coercion. Because of her beauty pageant past and her entanglement with Silvio Berlusconi, her account was discredited in the American press. Would we see her testimony differently now? I don’t yet think so.

We know, for example, that victims sometimes change their stories for reasons tied to the unknowable desire to forget. Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck, the lead accusers in the Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland, are other imperfect victims who feature in smiling photographs with Jackson and even courtroom defences of him during his lifetime, only later reversed. Of course, the facts of such cases are for the legal system to decide — but there is much to be said about how unforgiving we are of the confusion and sometimes erratic behaviour associated with victimhood. These are not bulletproof testimonies, they are human ones. In truth, visible ruptures of messiness and despair are often scars, not red flags.

In Giuffre’s case, the dynamite was a picture of Andrew, Ghislaine Maxwell and the teenager taken in March 2001 by Epstein himself, at Maxwell’s London home. Now two of the people present in that room have killed themselves. The conspiracy theories will rumble into the next few weeks, ebbing away before the next chapter of this sad story: more documents might be released, more celebrities implicated, more dispatches from the “rat-infested” Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee where Maxwell is serving out her time.

In time, all that will remain is the sense that the ugliness of the worst excesses of the rich and powerful, normally so carefully hidden by intricate social protections, broke containment and spilled forth into public consciousness — and with them a curious, tragic woman who bravely told her story and then stopped being able to cope. This isn’t just a story about Epstein; it’s about the unseen depravity of those at the top of society — those bored of normal seductions, glutted on privilege, and the glassy-eyed girls they wave wads of cash at. If this scandal exposed political and financial East Coast elites, the P Diddy trial — due to commence on Monday — looks set to do the same to their West Coast entertainer counterparts. In that case speculation suggests that Justin Bieber, who appears to be going through his own public breakdown, is following in Giuffre’s tragic footsteps.

If we can learn something from the story of Virginia Giuffre, it is this: for the abuser we reserve the lowest possible standard of accountability; for the survivor, the highest possible standards of behaviour. Giuffre lived and died labouring under this irony. If her legacy is as an inspiration for other accusers to speak out, it’s worth remembering why so many cannot bear to: because in doing so, they submit to the strictures of idealised victimhood; fall apart and you may be disbelieved.

The death of the Queen might eventually invite more sceptical and wide-ranging reflection. Georges Clemenceau said of the French Revolution that it was a bloc — to be accepted or rejected as a whole; the same is true of the British royal family. Any individual monarch is the product of an institution that revolves around the hereditary principle. Real monarchists must ask themselves whether they believe in this system enough to accept all its potential consequences. Remember that if Prince Charles had broken his neck playing polo in 1976, we would now be awaiting the coronation of King Andrew.

Curiously, a “successful” monarch and, especially, a long reign weakens the monarchy as an institution. During such a reign, loyalty comes to focus on a person, rather than on the Crown as an institution. Note how frequently, in recent years, politicians have answered questions about their views on monarchy with some anodyne remark about their admiration for the Queen. The cult of an individual sovereign increasingly overshadows all other members of their family, including their eventual successor.

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That heir, waiting in the wings, will have accumulated a great deal of baggage by the time that they get to the throne — whether that baggage means actresses and obesity (as in the case of Edward VII) or an unsuccessful marriage and a history of publicly expressing political views (the case of Charles III). The problems of a long reign are exacerbated when the monarch is a woman. Partly because they were comparatively rare in British public life until recently, Queens lend themselves to mythologisation.

There are two striking and worrying precedents for what happens when a long-serving monarch dies. The first is Elizabeth I. Her death was followed by an unsuccessful king (James I), a catastrophic king (Charles I), civil war, regicide and, for a time, republic. The second is Victoria, whose death was also followed by a period of turbulence for the monarchy, culminating in the abdication crisis of 1936. I am not being entirely flippant when I say that the First World War was, in some ways, a civil war within Victoria’s own family — in which the English branch came off much better than the German or Russian ones.

Their long reigns served to occlude problems that then came back to haunt the next monarch. Elizabeth I — who refused to “open a window into men’s souls” — was careful to cultivate a useful ambiguity over religion. But that ambiguity was linked to her personal idiosyncrasies — her refusal to marry, for instance, avoided the question of whether she would take a Protestant or Catholic husband — so that it was hard for the monarchy to sustain after her death.

The ambiguity of Victoria’s reign was less deliberate. Her long period on the throne and, particularly, her partial withdrawal from public life after the death of her husband, helped to conceal the extent to which (much to Victoria’s own distaste) the monarchy had lost its political power during her reign. It was significant that politicians did not consider it necessary to call a general election when she died: they had done so as a matter of course after the previous monarch’s death. Still, the monarchs that came after her did not really reconcile themselves to the institution’s loss of political power until the accession of George VI in 1936.

The central ambiguity of Elizabeth II’s long reign revolves around Britain’s relations with the wider world. Before her accession, she pledged herself to serve “our imperial family”. But the empire went in the early years of her reign and was replaced by the Commonwealth — Enoch Powell, always attentive to the precise meaning of constitutional terms, believed that the most important speech he ever made concerned the addition of the letter “s” after “realm” in the Royal Titles Bill of 1952. Elizabeth’s death has now raised awkward questions, long suppressed, about what the Commonwealth itself means and, in particular, whether the British monarch will remain its head.

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In some ways, the personalisation of the monarchy is more marked now than it was in 1901 or 1603. This is partly because of other changes in the British state. It is often suggested that every aspect of the constitution hinges on the monarchy. But in some ways, the reverse is true: the institutions of the British can get along perfectly well without a monarch — as was shown during the interregnum of 1649-1660 — though the monarchy has, in the past, been sustained by its relations with an infrastructure of ancien regime institutions.

In 1953, I suspect the Queen herself would have said that being head of the Church of England was the most important of her duties. Now the idea of a state church seems peculiar — most vicars would give you a blank look if you point out that parliament has not sanctioned the prayer book used in most churches. As for the House of Lords, it is now, for the most part, an assembly of retired, middle-ranking politicians — not a single one of the six surviving former prime ministers has bothered to take a peerage. The institutions that have long propped up the monarchy are ailing.

She was also always held to be above politics and often presented as representing an integrity that elected politicians lack. Yet the briefest glance at the register of members’ interests or parliamentary expense claims reveals that MPs most interested in personal enrichment tend to be fervent admirers of the Queen — and keen collectors of honours. One might also point out that two of the most important figures at the court of King Boris (the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, and Lord Geidt, advisor on ministerial standards) had previously worked in the royal household.

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For all the talk of the monarchy being “apolitical”, no serious observer doubts that the monarchy serves the interests of the Conservative Party — often, as when George V promoted “National Government” in 1931, serving those interests by going along with the Conservative claim that their own policies were “apolitical”. A group of MPs closely associated with Thatcherism, including Norman Tebbit and Nigel Lawson, wrote an interesting document in 1978. They were struck by the show of affection for the Queen during her Silver Jubilee; they recognised that it might reflect “a deep nostalgia, in part for what is thought of as a comfortable past”, suggesting that they needed to be careful with calls for radical change. All the same, they concluded that the spirit of the Jubilee would work to their advantage: “People will be more attracted by a promise … to restore some of the valued things they have lost than by promise of a vague, bright tomorrow.”

But Conservatives are not quite the royalists they sometimes make out. They are heirs to a political tradition that looks back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (when James II was abruptly ejected from the throne) and emphasises the pre-eminence of the parliament — especially the House of Commons. Churchill paid ostentatious deference to the young Queen Elizabeth and took the side of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. All the same, Churchill was blunt to the latter: “When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings.” He also, as First Lord of the Admiralty, once tried to name a ship HMS Oliver Cromwell.

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Conservatives found it easy to be loyal to Elizabeth II because her public statements — in favour of family, nation and the armed forces, and prone, in recent years, to evoke a certain memory of the Second World War — fitted with their own political vision. It will be interesting to see how they get on with a monarch who recently, albeit unintentionally, let it be known that he disapproves of their asylum policy and who has devoted much of his life to drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.

King Charles will, I suspect, not have an easy time. His reign will be relatively short and he will spend much of it in the shadow of his mother. The historian Peter Hennessy recently wrote that his generation (he is more or the less the same age as the King) found it hard to imagine any monarch other than Elizabeth II. Like many remarks that sound conservative, this is, when you think of it, profoundly subversive. Saying a monarch other than the present one if unthinkable is, in effect, saying that the continuation of monarchy is unthinkable.

And, while we are on the subject of unthinkable things, consider the dramatic constitutional rethinking likely to be brought about by, say, the break-up of the union, an attempt to re-enter the European Union, or the creation of a written constitution — all things desired by a significant minority of the population and all things that might raise questions about who should be head of state. For all the talk about centuries of continuity, I doubt if any realistic observer is sure the monarchy will survive for another 70 years. If it is to do so, it needs to get away from an emphasis on the supposed personal qualities of any individual King or Queen and rest once again on the abstract quality of the Crown. Perhaps one day historians will recognise that the most important constitutional commentator of the period was not Sir Simon Schama or Lord Hennessy but Johnny Rotten, who marked the Silver Jubilee of 1977 with the words: “She ain’t no human being.”

So when the Archbishop this week suggested Prince Andrew is “seeking to make amends” and encouraged people to be more “open and forgiving”, he was not going out on some fashionable theological limb. He was doing what he was supposed to be doing: proclaiming the faith.

But however often Christians say the word in church, forgiveness has always been a profoundly unpopular idea, and is increasingly so in a post-Christian society. Look at the reaction to the Archbishop’s comments. People are aghast and angry. Why? Because the very idea of forgiveness can be extremely hard to reconcile with the much simpler and more popular idea of justice.

Justice means people getting what they deserve. Wrongdoers facing punishment: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Punishment has to be proportionate to the wrong done. The scales of justice cry out to be balanced. It is a debt that has to be paid. Yet the greasy and featherbedded Prince Andrew has obviously not paid his debt — so how dare the Archbishop speak about forgiveness? Bloody establishment, they all look out for each other.

This is where justice can take us. It was Nietzsche — no friend of the Christian faith, of course — who famously suggested that even the justice of the courtroom can have a highly persecutory tone, a mob desire for the blood of the perpetrator camouflaged by wigs and gowns. Consider also that common set-up at the beginning of the trashy American revenge movie: a crime is committed that allows us to see the various acts of response, however gruesome, as a form of moral restitution. The idea of justice allows violence to be understood as morally acceptable, unavoidable even. Justice becomes the moral word for winning. And Americans like to be thought of as winners. It is, of course, their least attractive side. And their most foolish.

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At its worst, this logic of justice can perpetuate violence ad infinitum. It can create an unstoppable cycle of vendetta — one act of justice/violence inviting another. Feuds between families can perpetuate this drama over generations. Justice is the engine of revenge. Violence is mimetic. What most frightened Desmond Tutu about post-Apartheid South Africa was the prospect of justice driving a death cycle of violence — with some never-ending response and counter-response sending his beloved country into perpetual civil war. “No future without forgiveness,” he wrote. Forgiveness was a way of breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat violence. Peace could only be established by holding back on the justice bit. Forgive your enemies. That, for all its faults, is what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was seeking to model.

In complete contrast to Tutu’s “No forgiveness, no peace”, Black Lives Matter protestors regularly chant “No justice, no peace”. One way of reading this is that we won’t give you peace unless we have racial justice. It can be heard as a moral justification of ongoing violence.

As well as perpetuating discord, the justice tradition has another related weakness: it invariably imagines that the person calling for justice is in the right. When Hamlet appeals to Polonius to treat others better than they deserve, he observes: “Use every man after his own desert and who [of us] should escape whipping”. Or in other words: if we all get justice, we are all in trouble. In the same vein, Martin Luther came to realise that he hated the phrase “the justice of God” because all of us — sinners that we are — are condemned. Only through God’s forgiveness can we be saved. OK, this is church speak. But the equivalent secular point is that all of us require forgiveness. Justice language — unqualified by mercy — points the finger at us all in the end. This is why social justice warriors end up consuming each other in an orgy of recrimination.

The Jubilee is a perfect time to think about forgiveness. This is when we try and think of ourselves as a national community, reconciled for a few hours of cake-eating and tea-drinking. The street party is a powerful way of neighbours, who may have fought for years over the garden fence, to put “being right” aside. I am an enthusiastic monarchist because I think of the crown as holding the community together in a way that is beyond political contestation. The Queen has sought to do this for 70 years. It’s part of her priestly role as it were, it’s what she was anointed for. Thank God for her.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

Jubilees seek to restore something broken or lost. At the turn of the millennium, many of us came together to lobby for the forgiveness of the financial debts that the developing world had built up over years. Jubilee 2000 asked that we wipe the slate clean. It drew upon the Biblical idea of the Jubilee — that every 50 years debts would be redeemed. It is very telling that the Judeo-Christian tradition often uses financial language – debt, redemption – as ways of talking about salvation. Back then it was the right that complained about the forgiveness of debts. These days it is often the left. Both insist upon the iron logic of pay-back, justice.

Forgiveness is not sentimental slush. It’s not being overly nice or gullible. Properly speaking, it is about the refusal to respond to wrongdoing in kind — those last two words being very important. It is not a refusal of the criminal justice system. It is a recognition that you do not get punishment proportionate to the crime — a murderer does not get murdered, a perpetrator of sexual violence does not get molested. Even more, it is a denial of the satisfaction that comes with payback. As Tutu was right to point out, forgiveness is a way of giving the community back a future, a strategy of restoration.

The reason being the Archbishop of Canterbury is the most impossible job in the world is that he has to try and say something like this within a public culture that believes forgiveness is fundamentally mistaken and wrong. It requires messy compromises. It might let people off the hook, smirking as they slink away. It might leave some victims unsatisfied, bitter that justice has not been properly dispensed.

But the alternative is a kind of endless cultural war. “No justice, no peace” is a terrifying slogan. For often, justice is the desire for revenge by another name.

When has she come closest to peril? That’s easy, in your royal pub quiz: the death of Princess Diana. But why did she come so close? Because the royal family were not emotionally responsive when Diana died? Because they did not lower the flag, or leave the castle to meet their desolate people? Nonsense: this was an act of projection, of guilt buried under the anti-Jubilee of a death.

We understood why the monarchy shook when Diana died: because she died, because she married into a family that is dysfunctional, because we like it that way. Diana was not gilded by her status. She was killed by it. Her marriage was arranged when she needed a love match, and in that brief burst of understanding was our grief. Or it should have been.

Now Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers is here, and it adds detail to the groaning library of royal biography, which is an odd genre prone to be read not with understanding but with glee. Because if you understand you can’t go on with the game. Brown divides the royals into functional and dysfunctional: good and bad. I am more cynical: I divide them into victims and survivors.

The victims pile up with their awful testimony: who survives this family? Not Edward VIII, possibly a Nazi-sympathiser. But he wanted something less suffocating than a crown and married a woman who gave him less. The Queen Mother responded to his gift by telling people Mrs Simpson was a prostitute and denying her the title HRH. She was a sore winner but for some people nothing is ever enough. Brown speaks the party line here. The family, “always believed that it was the excess public attention that had promoted Edward’s delusion of outsize significance and the coddling of dangerous emotional needs”.

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There is Margaret, denied the man she loved, and by her sister, who then deceived herself about the cause of Margaret’s depression: because the Queen is a survivor. “Once,” writes Brown, “when one of Margaret’s inner circle called her to say her sister was threatening to throw herself out of the bedroom window the Queen replied, ‘Carry on with your house party. Her bedroom is on the ground floor’”. That’s a cold response to suicidal ideation. Margaret married a monster on the rebound and filled herself with fags, Famous Grouse, and nothing. When it was suggested to the Queen that a therapist might help her sister, the Queen replied, “Perhaps when she’s better we could consider that”. “It was one of her lifelong dreams to ride on a bus,” writes Brown sadly of Margaret, but I doubt it would have saved her, even if she had become a conductress. Margaret’s desire to be cremated at Slough was her personal elegy, made with apt disgust.

There is Charles, who lacked the words and the expectation of sympathy to tell his mother what he wanted — a wife he loved. There was Diana, a corpse, and Fergie, a tabloid headline, who cannot leave and cannot stay. She is trapped in the carpeted purgatory of her ex-husband’s home Royal Lodge, a dystopia with a vast TV on which they can watch the news that consumes them.

Both Andrew and Harry are victims of monarchy too: of Elizabeth’s dedication to the Edwardian style, which is tight-lipped, hierarchical, and filled with superficial morality. I suspect we need a more casual style of monarchy — that is what Harry howls for from California — but perhaps they think we will not accept a monarchy without the suffering that we impose on it? There are reasons why Elizabeth has been a successful queen beyond longevity: she placed it first, and not all the children thrived. One lost second son is a misfortune. Two is a pattern.

Andrew grew up to know that he is not as important as his older brother and the Queen, when she was present — she often wasn’t, she once returned from a royal tour and went straight to the races, not her children — presided over this. That’s male primogeniture for you. Winner takes all. It must be a canker unless you are peculiarly mentally healthy, even before you meet your mad acolytes.

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By Helen Thompson

If you feel yourself aggrieved, you may give yourself permission to behave as you wish. You will not open your own curtains. This is the testimony of a maid who hated Andrew because he made her climb the stairs to open his curtains. (It is impossible to believe that he is not addressing his mother.) You will call your wife, as Brown relates, “a fat cow”. You will have a collection of teddy bears, carefully arranged by the maid that hates you, even in your fifties, and yet imagine that you are really a naval officer. (Charles travels with a teddy bear according to Brown, but just the one). You will think, at best, that a trafficked 17-year-old will want to have sex with you because you are the Duke of York.

Then there is Harry. I used to think he left for privacy. Now, as he wades through autobiographies, Netflix deals and self-deception, I don’t think he left at all. Like Edward VIII, monarchy obsesses him; he can’t leave any more than Margaret or Sarah could. Attention without merit is addictive. Brown is fascinating on Harry and Meghan. “So why,” she asks, “didn’t Harry help navigate palace culture for his future wife?  He didn’t want to. Their complicity required Meghan to fight all the norms she had kicked against for so long. She was now his comrade in arms”. On Suits, she notes, Meghan was sixth on the call-sheet. In the royal family, Harry is sixth on the call sheet. They meet there, thwarted.

The two things that threaten the Jubilee — Andrew’s self-absorption and Harry’s rage — are entirely self-made. I know it isn’t kind to call a witch-goddess a bad mother, but perhaps you can’t mother a nation and your real children too. I wonder if they acknowledge it themselves. Charles’s plan to “slim down” the monarchy to himself, William, a middle-class woman and three children under nine, looks less like policy than testimony: a moment of self-knowledge and self-preservation before it all ends.

The Queen must have known. But she did it anyway, because though few people have any doubt that he is a total wrong’un (I don’t doubt it one bit), he is still family. Many families have rotters in their midst. And one of the most valuable things about family is that virtue is not a condition of membership. A mother can love her children, even if they have done terrible things — indeed, that is precisely the sort of dogged love many of us celebrated last Sunday. Besides, this was Prince Andrew’s father’s memorial service. Shamed or not, of course he had to be there. (Though, over in sunny California, the more virtuous members of the Royal family didn’t quite see it that way.)

In truth, I don’t much care for memorial services. The purpose of them is to speak well of the dead; literally, to eulogise. Such events work well for the powerful, the famous and the righteous. “A man of rare ability and distinction, rightly honoured and celebrated, he ever directed our attention away from himself,” said the Dean of Westminster of Prince Phillip. Memorial services don’t require much religion either, which is part of their popularity in a secular age. They are sandwiches of hymns and readings and speeches — and songs can be easily substituted for hymns, poems for Bible passages.

In my time as a priest, I have buried a number of men (always men, as it happens) about whom no one has a good word to say. I have buried paedophiles. I have buried murderers. No one wanted to come to their service. The funeral was just me, an empty crematorium, and their coffin. The weakness of the memorial service is that it doesn’t work in such circumstances. There is no eulogy to be had here because there are no good words. Memorial services exist for upstanding members of the community.

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But alone in the crem, undertakers having a fag outside, and armed only with the words of the Mass, there exists a kind of encounter with death, and with the evil that some people do, that for me at least is the absolute core of priestly ministry. Of course, most of us haven’t committed such crimes — but nonetheless, this still feels like the business end of the human condition. This is death as total desolation, without applause, without consolation. And of course, I pray for forgiveness, no matter what the crime. And for the victims of this person’s wickedness too. Which is why I often cannot myself forgive — that stuff is seriously above my pay grade. No, I will leave that bit to God.

There wasn’t a prayer of confession at this week’s memorial service for Prince Philip. Many would have loved to see Andrew perspire his way through that one. “We have done evil in your sight,” said my congregation together on Mothering Sunday. Some of us have more to confess than others. But confession and the search for redemption exists for those who have done great wrong as well as for those of us seeking reassurance as to the eternal consequences of our daily peccadillos.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” My church in South London has long been a black-majority church. Yet one of the most popular hymns we sing is one written by a former slave trader, John Newton. Had the memorial to him been in stone, no doubt we would have been asked to take it down, just as Jesus College Cambridge have been petitioning — unsuccessfully it now turns out — to have a memorial to a college benefactor, Tobias Rustat, taken down because of his links to the slave trade. Some months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury unwisely got involved, supporting its removal.

I have no problem with removing bits of old stone in churches and chapels. But I do find it problematic that we might do so on the basis of the virtue of those being memorialised. The church is not a house of moral virtue but a place for those seeking redemption — and that means a place for the wicked as well as for the just. “I once was lost and now am found,” wrote Newton.

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I am absolutely not arguing that we ought to see the good in people who have done great wrong, that somehow, deep down, they have within them a spark of goodness. Nor am I naive about the possibility of change. Priests are generally much more sceptical of human nature than many people expect. We have listened to so much self-justifying bullshit over the years — how could we not be? No, this is not about thinking people are better than they are. It is about God’s capacity to forgive in a way which exceeds my own.

The possibility of forgiveness is awkwardly related to morality. Secular versions of evil generally invite a kind of retributive logic in which wickedness deserves punishment. Forgiveness sticks in the craw of moral reasoning. Which is why, without God, morality inevitably becomes a kind of cancel culture — a righteous anger that responds to injustice with punishment. And such a culture will have no truck with what might look like attempts to rehabilitate wrongdoers — sweaty nonces, whether princes or not.

But fundamentally, Christianity isn’t much interested in morality, it’s interested in love. At its core, it’s about how to love the intrinsically unlovable. As a mother might love her unlovable child. As God might love us. Allowing Andrew to support her as she walked into the place where she made vows to support the Christian faith might just be one of the most obviously religious things the Queen has done. And when Christianity gets enacted at this level, we should expect to be scorned for it, not applauded.

Weinstein’s guilty verdict remains unusual. Despite the precedent it set, and successful efforts to reduce the stigma of reporting a sexual assault, most accused rapists still never see the inside of a courtroom. It’s not just that criminal prosecutions of sex offenders are few and far between, owing to the difficulty of proving a crime that usually leaves neither witnesses nor physical evidence. Even civil lawsuits usually end before trial: with a mutually agreed-upon settlement.

Settlements, and the NDAs that often accompany them, have long been a thorn in the side of those who want to see sexual assaults taken seriously and punished in the same way as other crimes. Weinstein’s ability to pay off the women who threatened to sue him for sexual harassment — and the women’s willingness to accept money in exchange for their silence — allowed his predatory behaviour to continue unchecked for ages, an open secret that actually acted as the punchline to many a Hollywood in-joke. And while the #MeToo movement might have ended Weinstein’s reign of terror, it hasn’t ended the practice of paying victims to shut up and go away.

We’ve been reminded of this most recently with the resolution of Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew, Giuffre having agreed to settle for an undisclosed sum. Although the media response has been painstakingly charitable to Giuffre, suggesting that the settlement is close enough to an acknowledgment of wrongdoing on Andrew’s part, and she has good reason to be satisfied, one still senses the disappointing spectre of the trial-that-never-was lurking unrealised in the background.

After it was reported that he had demanded a jury trial, there was much speculation about how he would perform on the witness stand, some of it almost gleeful. But unlike Weinstein, Andrew will never suffer the humiliation of a trial, never be subject to excruciating questions under penalty of perjury, never have the stain of a guilty verdict affixed permanently to his name. An expression of regret is still not an admission of guilt, no matter how you slice it. Giuffre’s choice might be good enough for her, but it leaves a number of questions unanswered.

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By Sarah Ditum

The question of how best to make men answer for the sexual violation of women is age-old, a conundrum that humans have been trying and failing to solve since the dawn of time. The Bible, for instance, suggests punishing rapists by forcing them to marry their victims, a “you break it you buy it” policy rooted in the archaic notion that a woman deflowered, even against her will, has been stripped of her most vital asset.

Until a woman was recognised as a person with bodily autonomy, sexual assault was seen as a crime against her keeper — a husband or father — rather than the woman herself. It’s an idea that is spectacularly offensive today, dehumanising and trivialising at once. There’s a jaw-dropper of a moment in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, a film based on a true story and billed as a sort of fourteenth century #MeToo saga: the heroine Marguerite is informed that her rapist will only answer for what he’s done if her husband is willing to bring charges for her defilement as his property. In reality, she would undoubtedly have been aware of this fact already; a male character only needs to explain it to her for the benefit of an audience who might not have realised how bad the bad old days actually were for women. It’s not Marguerite’s suffering that must be answered for, but her husband’s wounded ego.

The Last Duel was meant to be an Oscar contender, but instead of accolades and nominations, the film was scrutinised for its #MeToo relevance and met with questions about whether its content was meant as an apology of sorts for its stars’ former affiliation with Hollywood’s most notorious sex offender. (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who wrote the film, won a Best Screenplay Oscar back in 1998 after Weinstein rescued their script for Good Will Hunting from production purgatory.)

Damon dismissed that notion, instead citing the real Marguerite’s heroism — continuing to speak truth to power, even though her husband’s loss in the titular duel would have seen her burned at the stake for bringing a false accusation — as the impetus for making the movie. And right on: after what she went through, Marguerite deserves better than to have her story subsumed into a redemption tour for male filmmakers who are discomfited by their one-time relationship with Harvey Weinstein.

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In highlighting the horrors of sexism in the fourteenth century, and one woman’s courage in the face of them, The Last Duel shines a light on the ways in which things have changed — mostly for the better, but not entirely. Implicit in our admiration of Marguerite is a sense that this, really, is how a victim should behave: speaking truth to power at any cost, even if it means sacrificing her own life in the process. Why? Because we, the people, want to see justice. And even in a post-MeToo world where we treat sexual assault with the seriousness it deserves, justice has nothing to do with ensuring a good outcome for the victim; all that matters, all we care about, is that perpetrator meets a bad end.

This desire, not just for punishment but the public spectacle of a brutalised victim standing up and demanding recognition, has reigned throughout the contemporary quest to topple predatory men from their positions of power. Witness the lionisation of Christine Blasey Ford for her choice to testify publicly against Brett Kavanaugh. See the two books written by the journalists who exposed Weinstein, in which the women who spoke on the record, despite the risks and their fears, are rewarded with glowing profiles (while those who were, by implication, too cowardly to speak out sometimes seem like roadblocks in the path to justice). One of the key sources, Rose McGowan, wrote a memoir that was called simply: Brave.

For a period of time, the #MeToo essay was a genre unto itself, as women laid bare their sexual trauma for an insatiable, slavering audience. The movement demanded martyrs: the more a woman suffered to tell her story, the more heroic she was. And implicit in this conversation was that those who didn’t destroy their lives for the cause — who stayed silent, who took money, who signed NDAs — were the opposite of courageous, even selfish, allowing the men to get away with it and perhaps even enabling them to do it again. A peculiar twist in the Virginia Giuffre story is that once she stopped pushing for a trial and accepted a settlement, the greatest praise for her bravery came not from the media, but from the man she had accused.

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The desire to punish rapists comes from a good place, of course: a necessary correction to a system that too often failed to punish men for sexual assault. But, in our all-consuming quest to punish the man, the woman he hurt is once again forgotten. Like Marguerite’s husband, we pursue justice in the victim’s name, but not her best interests. No longer is rape seen as a property crime; it’s more traumatic, more terrible, on a par with murder or perhaps even worse — and the man who did it has to pay. But the very idea of compensating the woman seems impossible, given the magnitude of the offence.

And so, in our attempts to construct a new narrative around sexual assault, we have managed to reinforce the worst conclusions of the old one: where a rape victim used to be seen as so debased by the experience that she could no longer move in polite society, now we imagine her pushed to the margins by the magnitude of her trauma. The nature of the damage has changed, but the song (and assumption of irreparable ruin) remains the same. Like the Biblical woman deflowered, the victim can never be whole again. No, she’s not dead, but the unspoken subtext is that she might as well be — and so, like the victim of a murder, the system seeks only to avenge her.

But unlike the murder victim, the woman who’s been sexually assaulted still has a life to live. And what if her vision for that life doesn’t involve sacrificing herself a second time over on the altar of society’s thirst for vengeance? What if a trial, traumatic in its own right and with no assurance of a good outcome, is something she’d rather not endure? What if she prefers to sue, and settle, in a more private process that centres her desires and offers material reparations for her suffering?

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Ultimately, Weinstein’s victims got both the satisfaction of a guilty verdict and the recompense of a financial award, albeit one litigated (and hence reduced) by the bankruptcy court. There’s a poetic justice there: Weinstein extorted sex by promising success and stardom for those who cooperated, alongside the threat of financial ruin if they didn’t. For him to end up incarcerated and destitute, while the women he harmed walk away with millions, feels like the proper conclusion.

But the victim who keeps on living after being assaulted, let alone one who demands compensation in order to live well, remains deeply inconvenient to a society that wants to punish its criminals with little thought for the people they’ve hurt. When all is said and done, it’s the bad men, not their victims, who we tend to remember. And so, rather than heaping scorn or judgment on women who settle out of court, who seek reparations on their own terms, maybe we should see them as taking back something vital: their agency, their freedom to move forward, and their right to decide how trauma does (or doesn’t) define their lives.

What’s the point of Prince Andrew? I don’t ask this only to be cruel, although there is an obvious cruelty in suggesting that an actual person might be pointless. But Prince Andrew isn’t just a person — he’s also a prince, elevated by birth to a strange prominence in an institution that turned out to have no need of him.

He’s the redundant spare, not even useful for making dynastic alliances, since there are no royal houses left worth allying with; and anyway, diplomacy by human meat market was out of fashion before he was born. He doesn’t even have the dignity of being a working royal, since 2019 when he stepped back from all public duties over his “association” with the late sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Although Prince Andrew remains close to the Queen, the exact nature of that “association” continues to hang rancidly over the royal family. Was he just hanging around with Epstein, or did he — as Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Guiffre states in a lawsuit filed on Monday — take part in the sexual abuse of teenage girls? Was he somehow ignorant of everything he was adjacent to, or actually corrupt? Stupid, or degenerate? (Prince Andrew denies Guiffre’s claims.)

There’s a photo of Prince Andrew from 2001 with then 17-year-old Guiffre. She beams at the camera, long blonde hair hanging below her collarbone and a flash of midriff exposed; he stands side-on, arm around her waist, adult fingers touching bare childish skin, an expression of dazed expectation on his face like a man who can’t believe his luck. And in the background, Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who allegedly groomed and recruited the girls (Maxwell denies this), smiling happily — the smile of a complacent friend or a satisfied madam, depending on what you choose to read into it.

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Prince Andrew’s response to this photo has been to suggest that it has been “doctored”, claiming: “I am not one to, as it were, hug.” (Pictures of him taken at various nightclubs suggest that he is very much one to, as it were, hug.) As defences go, it’s only marginally less hard to swallow than the Pizza Express alibi or the claim he cannot sweat. Still, you can understand his desperation to argue it away: twenty years on, the picture looks grotesque, his age an obscenity next to Guiffre’s youth.

Would it have looked that way at the time it was taken? The millennium was a strange, unsettled moment for talking about girls and sex. On the one hand, the tabloids had picked out paedophiles as the villains of the moment (the apotheosis of this came in 2000, when a paediatrician’s home was vandalised with graffiti reading “paedo”: police confirmed that the perpetrators had confused the job with the crime). On the other, the titillating concept of the “barely legal” girl was firmly established in pornography and spilling over into popular culture.

And at the same time, the American evangelical movement had been doing its part for the fetishisation of virginity by promoting “abstinence-only” education and coaxing teens into wearing “promise rings” that showed their commitment to no sex before marriage. Britney Spears wore one: it seemed to be taken less as an assertion of her innocence than as a provocation to those who fantasised about despoiling her.

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In 2000, a businessman allegedly offered Britney $7.5m for the honour of deflowering her. Two years later, the DJ Chris Moyles was chatting about another teenage singer’s virginity on his Radio 1 show: on the day Charlotte Church turned 16, he volunteered to “lead her through the forest of sexuality”. (Moyles was censured by the Broadcasting Standards Commission, but he kept his job.)

The physical ideal of the late twentieth century and early noughties was nymphet-esque — slim hips, pert tits and, most important of all, a set of taut and unstretchmarked abdominals to make clear that all fecundity was as yet untested. The line of girl and woman was blurred and blurred again. In an early Kate Moss photoshoot that I’d see regularly on halls of residence walls later, the then sixteen-year-old model wears nothing but black knickers, stockings and heels, and holds a teddy bear to cover her breasts.

The taboo on underage sex was strong enough to make the idea of breaking it exciting, and no stronger. Even the wholly un-edgy indie band Travis (a kind of John the Baptist before Coldplay’s arrival as the Jesus of inoffensive guitar music) had a song called “U16 Girls”.

Prince Andrew now denies that he visited West End nightclub Tramps with Guiffre. But if he’d been there in the late 80s, he could have shared the dancefloor with Rolling Stone Bill Wyman and his girlfriend Mandy Smith — she was thirteen when they got together, and he was 47. When the relationship became public after she reached the age of consent, it was treated as a joke rather than a sex offence, with him the randy old man and her the canny little starfucker. Friends of the couple from that era look back and feel ashamed for turning a blind eye, but still, they turned a blind eye.

When, in 2012, the extent of Jimmy Savile’s predations became obvious and the complicity of the BBC undeniable, journalist Rachel Cooke wrote this in the Observer:

“Our outrage, in truth, has little to do with any institution, however remiss. It’s born of bewilderment that something so terrible could be in plain sight. Why, we wonder, did we not notice? Yet even this idea, if you unpick it, is kind of phoney.”

What Savile was had always been obvious. But for decades, it was seen as an ugly but acceptable peccadillo for a man to have sex with a girl. And then, one day, it wasn’t seen that way at all anymore.

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How we think about age, power and sex has changed immeasurably over the last decades. When I saw the revival of David Mamet’s sexual harassment drama Oleanna — currently running in London — it seemed flat, despite the sparring dialogue. In 1992, when the play debuted, audiences saw genuine ambiguity in the relationship between a professor and his wounded female student. Did he cross the line? Was she coaxed into seeing herself as a victim of campus politics?

In 2021, the moment he steps up behind her and places his hands on her shoulders, he’s lost. We know, now, that a tutor doesn’t touch a student that way. Even if she’s technically an adult, her comparative youth and institutional inferiority are blatant. The violation is unarguable.

What a shock, I suppose, to be one of the men around whom this cultural shift took place. To be, say, Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2008 used a plea bargain to wriggle out of being prosecuted for procuring a minor for prostitution, and was able to return to his life of wealth and high-rolling connection, until in 2019 he found himself imprisoned and facing a similar set of charges all over again.

The taint of connection with Epstein spilled out, with Prince Andrew alongside Bill Gates and the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret in the list of those whose reputations have turned to dirt. Epstein’s suicide hastened the civil suits such as the one against Prince Andrew, which would otherwise have had to wait for the criminal trial to conclude. It also made them more urgent: from the perspective of Epstein’s victims, with him dead, they must look to the living for someone to hold accountable. For Guiffre, suing Prince Andrew is the next best thing to justice.

So maybe this will be the point of Prince Andrew. His relationship with Epstein, and its transformation from something that could be winked at to something that could potentially soil the entire royal family, could prove to be a measure of the change in his lifetime. There’s plenty still that’s grim in the treatment of girls, but at least today if someone were to be proven to have knowingly had sex with a trafficked teenager — even if that someone was a prince — there’d be no laughing it off.

No one ever actually says the words “Epstein didn’t kill himself” in the new documentary miniseries, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which has been on the Netflix most-watched lists in the US and UK for several weeks. But we hear from the celebrity pathologist Michael Baden, who argues that fractures in Epstein’s neck suggested murder rather than suicide, and from victims including Virginia Robert Giuffre, who describes the process by which Epstein’s powerful friends became powerful enemies following his downfall. The viewer is relied upon to reach her own conclusions.

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I was surprised by Filthy Rich, but not by these provocative claims. Surely everyone knows by now that famous people were tangled up in the Epstein affair — Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew, along with many more — and that wealth and power were at the heart of it all. Just in case you missed the message in the title, the opening credits show us the streets of New York and Palm Beach papered with $100 bills. It’s all about the money, honey!

No, what surprised me about the victims’ accounts of Epstein’s crimes was how similar they sounded to accounts detailed in various Serious Case Reviews published in the UK over the past decade, investigating the official response to child sexual abuse committed by gangs in cities including Rotherham, Rochdale, and Oxford. The perpetrators in these cases were able to evade justice for many years, not because they were rich, “filthy” or otherwise, but because of the failures of the police and local authorities, combined with the gangs’ efforts to groom their young victims and then intimidate them into silence. Epstein raped his victims in his mansions and on his private jet. These gangs raped their victims in cheap hotels, public parks, and in grubby flats above takeaway joints. The long-term harm done to the girls was not much different.

Filthy Rich gives us the impression that Epstein’s initial success in eluding the authorities was a direct consequence of his wealth. It is certainly true that he was able to hire a stellar legal team, who harassed his teenage victims with questions including “is it true that you’ve had three abortions?” But then, famously, the victims of the Rochdale gang were faced with 11 rounds of cross-examination by 11 barristers, all of whom asked similarly distressing questions. And while Epstein undoubtedly used his status to menace the girls he abused, it’s foolish to suggest that a perpetrator needs either money or powerful friends to silence children, not when murdering a victim and her family in an arson attack works just as well. Analysis of victim surveys in both the US and the UK reveal less than 1% of rapes result in a conviction, meaning that avoiding imprisonment is not only unremarkable, it is the norm. You really don’t need to be an Epstein to get away with Epstein’s crimes.

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But the details of his crimes are only one facet of the Epstein legend. He is among a number of serial sexual predators who have come to public attention in recent years, but certain crucial elements of Epstein’s story have allowed him to assume a unique cultural position as the biggest and baddest predator of them all.

There is the manner of his death, of course. The abundance of circumstantial evidence and motive means that, although it may be cranky to believe that “Epstein didn’t kill himself”, it is not actually deranged. Added to this semi-plausible claim is the fact that the figure of Epstein slots so neatly into a narrative of power run amok. Given that his co-offenders allegedly included Democrats, Republicans, and members of the British royal family, this unusually adaptable conspiracy theory can be put to many purposes. For anti-capitalists, Epstein can play the role of representative of the sinister global elite; for conservative adherents to the Church of QAnon, he embodies the corruption of the deep state and its obedient political class. This is an idea that, in an age of hyper-partisanship, manages somehow to be non-partisan.

At the same time, some of the absurd details of the Epstein affair have captured the imagination of a certain style of arch nihilist who spends too much time online. “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is a serious claim, but it is also a joke, popularised on social media and now featured on beer cans and Christmas jumpers. In his opening monologue at the 2019 Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais used the phrase as a punchline and, in response to groans from the audience of Hollywood celebrities, spelled out the anti-establishment essence of the meme: “I know he’s your friend, but I don’t care.”

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Sometimes a villain comes along who perfectly captures the mood of the moment. He (for it is almost always a ‘he’) steps into a cultural role that seemed to be waiting for him. Charles Manson achieved this in 1969, after orchestrating the murder of seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, in an orgy of violence that, in a horribly dark twist, could have been lifted straight from a film by Roman Polanski, Tate’s husband. Anyone suspicious or fearful of the counterculture now had a focus for their anxiety in the form of the drug-addled, dead-eyed followers who carried out Manson’s atrocities. These murders marked the end of the optimism of the Sixties, coming to symbolise the dark side of ‘free love’.

Looking further into the past, neither Epstein nor Manson are yet able to match the iconic position of Jack the Ripper, whose legend has survived because it has proved so malleable. As the author and academic Clive Bloom describes, the Ripper was variously understood by his contemporaries to be anything “from an anarchist terrorist, to a twisted social reformer, mad doctor, psychotic aristocrat or homicidal immigrant of Jewish or ‘Asiatic’ background.” Over time, his representation changed, so that by the 1960s he had morphed from a working class man of the East End to an upper class toff in a top-hat, “symbol of a predatory aristocracy.” The Ripper, his true identity forever unknown, can be whoever we want him to be.

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I suspect that Epstein could be headed for a similar legacy — a match for Manson, if not perhaps for the Ripper. The word ‘Epstein’ already functions as a metonym, code for a genre of conspiratorial discourse that looms larger than the man himself.

This is not a welcome trend, although it may be an inevitable one. The process of immortalising a hideous predator serves to push his victims out of sight, their stories useful only insofar as they prop up the villain’s legend. For all of his money and power, Epstein was not vastly different from any of the other child abusers who regularly go unpunished, and to elevate the status of his seedy crimes is to also elevate the status of the man himself. He deserves to be despised and then quickly forgotten, but he won’t be — the myth of Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich is too compelling to be abandoned now. And while we cannot be sure exactly how he died, I do feel confident in making this — regrettable — conjecture: if he had known quite how famous he would become in death, I’m quite sure that Epstein would have been delighted.